Evaluation Song and Dance

I just finished typing up a real, honest to goodness lesson plan. That might not shock you, given that I am a teacher, but I realized that it’s been a little while. Don’t get me wrong, I do a weekly plan that includes every objective of every hour of every day, as do most teachers at my school. But very rarely do I sit down to do a piece-by-piece script of a single, one-hour lesson. In fact, I only do it when I am told to do so, almost exclusively for evaluation.

That’s the funny thing about evaluation in teaching or, at least, novice teaching. We are expected to do things for the purpose of evaluation that are entirely impractical to expect a regular basis. The result is a process far more akin to artistic performance than professional assessment.

First, we compose two- or three-page lesson plans, demonstrating our satisfaction of this standard of the teaching profession or that best practice. Generally, they require a good hour of our time to articulate and format. I know parents and professors would like to believe we do this for every cherished moment with the children but… get real. Even assuming half an hour, if I were to do this for every lesson for a whole week, I’d spend nigh on 20 hours a week in planning alone! (Maybe if I worked the mythic 16-hour KIPP day, this would be achievable.)

Then, almost always, we are evaluated at carefully appointed dates and times. Consequently, we are able to assure that we will be teaching our best possible lesson and be at our most obscenely over-prepared, well-stocked with carefully differentiated materials, painstakingly made hands-on activities, key cross-disciplinary connections, and deeply meaningful realia, --- all the trappings of a great teacher, all impossible for the new teacher to have on hand with the daily frequency we wish we could.

When it’s show-time and our evaluator arrives, we know what we’re expected to do and we are careful to do it. Knowing that we need to be demonstrating standard four, we’re careful to push our children up Bloom’s taxonomy and don’t worry about neglecting the comprehensible input, because that’s standard seven. Or perhaps we’ll focus on meeting the needs of our English Language Learners and leave our Special Populations behind, or perhaps we’ll integrate some technology and leave out the insuring of equity for all learners.

When the process is over, all our evaluation reveals is our understanding of the expectations, our ability to meet them on cue. There is no real assessment of our daily, meaningful implementation of best practices. There is no evaluation of what is actually experienced by our students.

My solution? First, instead of submitting a single, ad hoc lesson plan, we should submit our regular weekly plans. We should submit the plan before we had the training on X, Y, or Z, and then after, showing how that professional development changed our regular plan and our everyday practice. Then, we keep submitting those plans, creating the expectation that we keep incorporating those improvements. For observation-based evaluation, we set aside dreamy best practices possible only with limitless time and boundless resources. They are useful as aspirations but not as standards of evaluation. We need to establish expectations that should be visible in any meaningful lesson. Informed by our actual lesson plans, our evaluator comes in at two or three appropriate times, unannounced, over the course of a week and stays for an hour, assessing our success in meeting those expectations. If you observe three of my writing or math lessons in a week and there’s a best practice I’m not doing, it’s safe to say I don’t do it. Likewise, if I don’t meet the needs of a subgroup of my students one time in three, they’re going unmet.

Teachers don’t need to be evaluated on what they can do, given unlimited prep time and warned well in advance, they need to be evaluated on what they actually do, every day. I’m sorry to say it but it’s true: my students don’t experience my highest potential, they experience my daily practice. They experience how many hours I have to plan and prepare and how many I need to set aside for sleeping, eating and me. My teaching and my students’ learning is tempered by reality, mine as well as theirs, and good evaluation should reflect that.